https://worldcore.eu/News/93/urgent-notification11.02.2019
Dear Clients,
Worldcore informs about closure of banking facilities for unknown period. We kindly ask all Worldcore customers to withdraw remaining balances to bank accounts before February, 25.
Withdrawals are allowed only to the name of the account holder at Worldcore. Please be informed that Third-party transfers are not available anymore.
Since this day, bank transfers will be unavqilable and impossible for unknown period.
The list of force-majeure reasons is very long and we share it with our customers with full transparency as we always did.
The company started it’s operation in the end of 2015 and we already reached around $100 Million annual transaction volume in 2017. Worldcore was built without attracting venture funding or any other third-party investors.
We built strong team of over 30 experts in all fields required for operating successful and rapidly growing - developers, marketing team, sales department, legal& compliance department, KYC department.
We build a lot of partnerships by the end of 2017 and Worldcre almost reached break-even point first time in August 2017, while having almost 150,000 Euros average monthly operational costs.
In the end of 2017 we lost our 2 key financial partners - Rietumu Bank and Wave Crest Holdings. Rietumu was used by Worldcore as main operator for bank transfers and Wave Crest was the card issuer. We had the highest ATM withdrawal limits on the market and everything worked like a clock in both directions until these institutions got into problem with authorities. For example, Rietumu got fined for 80 Million Euros in world-famous French AML case. Wave Crest lost it’s license with Visa and got tons of restrictions for MasterCard card programmes.
Initially, we didn’t think that such situation can ruin our well-established company, we had around 5 more backup bank accounts for operation and we immediately started looking for new card issuer to resume issuance of debit cards as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the company has lost almost 90% of it’s monthly revenue due to these force-majeurs and got a lot of reputational losses, while being under informatioon attack, which we reported every month and hired experienced lawyers to fight with hundreds of mass media, which published false and paid materials blacking our repiutation.
Overflood of such content about our company became a one more non-breakable wall to build new partnerships with card issuers and banks because every compliance team does it’s own due diligence with google search results as well.
Morerover, almost every next month after November, we lost our backup bank accounts one by one. In accordance with EU payment services and banking laws, banks has no right to close or not to open an account without a reason, but all of them did it this way and it’s absolutely illegal from their side.
Many time we were asking for assistance from our regulator Czech National Bank. They were are always totally passive to this situation, even when Worldcore and other Czech payment companies submitted collective dispute for illegal actions and ignorance of FinTech by banks. Reaction of regulator to any of our (or other’s) requests usually takes months and in most cases doesn’t bring the expected result, which has to be backed by the law, which we always followed.
By summer 2018 situation with banks became critical and we were unable to process withdrawals of our clients, we had no other choice than to open an account with similar payment company to process people’s transfers, and we succeeded with it. In accordance with the European law, payment institution can hold client’s funds in credit institution (bank) but not in another payment institution. This so-called violation from our side was confirmed with Czech National Bank because otherwise thousands of people will have no access to their funds in Worldcore accounts and will send them millions of disputes that Worldcore doesn’t process payments.
Meanwhile, since September 2017 to December 2018 Worldcore was under the strongest information attack initiated by criminal group from CIS countries to discredit company and involve in BlackPR war of 2 criminal groups. The reason for such attack, which costed us million Euros of losses (direct losses, neverending legal fees to communicate with mass media and submit 1000s disputes for deletion of Black PR articles against Worldcore.
All this period the monthly operational loss of Worldcore only grew because by the time of 10/2017 it was a large established business with high revenue, high transaction volume, visibility and popularity on the market.
A lot of our colleagues which we communicate with are close to business closure due to complete shock of what’s happening on the market and how almost all banks violate the law of working with payment institutions and providing accounts for them.
When we started obtaining required codes for direct connection to SEPA network and process EUR transfers without using banks and with providing dedicated IBAN account for each customer, all three providers of such facilities (Banking Circle, Central Bank of Lithuania, SolarisBank) answered almost the same - they can’t allocate sufficient resources at the moment to onboard Worldcore. The law doesn’t allow to block access to banking services for Fintech companies now, but according to current reality, professional bank lawyers now just started linking to their internal technical issues and impossibility to allocate resources for providing access to banking services for fintech companies.
Please also note that each answer from every organisation starting from regulator and ending by card issuer is a very slow multi-weeks or in the worst-case multi-months chat where nobody cares (except our team) about our monthly operational losses, which we couldn’t even reduce because the whole infrastructure became too big by the end of 2017 and was build step by step while the company and load to employees was rapidly growing.
Unfortunately, we are already out of physical and financial resources to keep fighting and breaking 10 non-breakable walls the same time, waiting and hoping for the best while dealing with almost every organisation - banks, regulator, card issuers.
Such combination of barriers and total passiveness of regulator in all of these cases is a headshot with guaranteed death to any fintech business. Our team spent over 5 years to build this project from the scratch to the state, in which you currently see it, we have been working day and night, there are hundreds of thousands lines of code in Worldcore software and the same number of hours of legal works. Since 2017 our life turned into hell, we didn’t give up but we are out of power and finances to keep waiting for something better and miracle from this industry according to what’s going on in 2017, 2018 and 2019 with regulations, authorities and relationships between banks and fintech companies, if this horror can be called relationships.
Worldcore team sincerely hopes for everyone’s understanding, we did all that we could and this measure is forced by large number of circumstances where chances to survive for the company are close to zero.
Please withdraw your unspent balances from accounts before February 25.
Withdrawals are allowed only to the name of the account holder at Worldcore. Please be informed that Third-party transfers are not available anymore.
After this date it will be impossible to be done yourself in Worldcore accounts because we cannot continue finance large Amazon technical infrastructure to continue supporting payment system.
We apologize for inconvenience caused by all of circumsances listed above and we are proud to say that we did our best to delivery the top quality financial services in accordance with mission of our project.
